A year of box office Brits (From The Northern Echo)

A year of box office Brits

4:34pm Thursday 5th January 2012 in Features By Steve Pratt

Harry Potter was magic at the box office in 2011, but who were the soaring stars and who were the floundering flops on the big screen? Steve Pratt rewinds the movies of the past 12 months.

BOY wizard Harry Potter performed his last magic trick, Mel Gibson talked to a beaver and four sex-mad schoolboys scored at the cinema, if not with the girls.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and The Inbetweeners, the movie of the C4 comedy hit, were two of the top three movies in the UK in 2011.

But cinemagoers weren’t interested in Gibson, rejecting his bid to regain box office glory.

It was Colin Firth who stuttered and stammered his way through The King’s Speech to fill the third place and make it an all-British top three. To be accurate, the Potter franchise is backed by a US studio, but Harry isn’t going anywhere as Warner Bros is turning Leavesden Studios, where the movies were made, into a visitor attraction.

2011 was the year George Smiley came out of the cold and retirement to play I spy again with a top-notch British cast, led by Gary Oldman, and boost British hopes of Oscar glory this year too.

Denied an Oscar for A Single Man in 2010, Firth finally won for The King’s Speech. Who could have forseen that a play about a monarch’s attempt to conquer his speech impediment would strike such a chord with cinemagoers?

Equally, The Inbetweeners confounded everyone, not only by being funny but also by taking a staggering £46m. Then again, it’s not unheard of – the big screen version of another small-screen comedy, On The Buses, was the top-grossing movie of 1971 and spawned two sequels.

If Firth was one of the stars of the year, Gibson failed to make a comeback – and whether Tom Cruise scaling the tallest building the world as agent Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol can restore his box-office cred has yet to be seen.

It wasn’t a good year for Hollywood’s big hitters, with Harrison Ford failing to attract big audiences with Cowboys And Aliens or newsroom comedy Morning Glory. Only Johnny Depp showed real star power by captaining the fourth and unnecessary Pirates Of The Caribbean adventure to box office glory.

The remakes continued, often leaving you asking “Why?”. Jeff Bridges donned eyepatch and saddled up in the old John Wayne role of Rooster Coburn in True Grit, where the biggest surprise was finding the Coen brothers directing, fresh from Academy Award success with No Country For Old Men.

David Fincher too, after his Oscar-winning The Social Network, remade The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, an English language version of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.

The original Swedish film was great, but had subtitles, and we know how US producers assume audiences are too lazy (or too illiterate) to read them.

The new version stars Daniel Craig, who also launched Bond 23, now officially called Skyfall, a title that makes slightly more sense than Bond 22’s Quantum Of Solace. His press conference hat-trick saw him beside Ford in the summer to promote Cowboys And Aliens. The film does what it says on the tin – it has cowboys, it has aliens – but never manages to combine them satisfactorily.

JANE EYRE was filmed, but it was Wuthering Heights which took a radical approach to a familiar classic, although, surprisingly, didn’t arouse as much interest or ire as expected. The Yorkshire moors have never looked so bleak and grim as in Andrea Arnold’s movie featuring a black Heathcliff who went around telling people to eff off.

Some would see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a remake because the BBC filmed John Le Carre’s spy tale as a mini-series in 1979. The new version featured the cream of British acting talent Oldman, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Firth again) in a complex espionage story.

If your franchise runs out of steam, make a prequel. Both the excellent Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes – one of the pleasant surprises of 2011 – and X-Men: First Class showed there was still life in an old format.

As for sequels, The Hangover Part 2 did nothing different the second time around. This was more or less a replay of the first one, but set in Thailand. Rude and crude, it never quite plumbed the depths of bad taste that The Inbetweeners did. But Kristin Wiig’s US comedy Bridesmaids gave it a good run for its money with near-the-knuckle humour and toilet jokes.

ONE of the best movies of the year came out of nowhere – Senna, a documentary about the racing driver. The novelty was that it did away with talking heads and featured fantastic behind-the-scenes and on-thetrack footage of Formula 1 races.

A truly remarkable movie, as was another vehicular drama, Drive, in which Ryan Gosling plays a getaway driver who can’t get away from a villainous bunch that want more than to let down his tyres.

Original too was Black Swan with Natalie Portman a worthy best actress Oscar-winner as a ballet dancer getting too emotionally involved in a production of Swan Lake. This had everything – a mad mother, a crazy director, lesbian couplings, body horror and, oh, a bit of dancing.

The Three Musketeers returned with the accent on the three, for this was one of the many 3D entries this year, leaving cinemagoers feeling they’ve spent most of the year wearing those uncomfortable glasses. The format still has its detractors, but not Martin Scorsese, who lovingly embraced 3D in his latest film Hugo.

And so to 2012 with a Margaret Thatcher biopic, Michael Fassbender baring body and soul as a sex addict in Shame, and a black-andwhite silent movie The Artist opening in the first weeks of the year.

I wouldn’t mind betting that among them are strong Oscar contenders for this year’s best actress (Meryl Streep), actor (Michael Fassbender) and film (The Artist).